I Almost Lost My Parents

My name is Emily, I was born and raised in New Jersey and I am currently twenty years old. I moved to Tucson, Arizona in 2016 when I was going into my sophomore year of high school. Driving attentively was something I learned quickly, and continue to learn. In my first week of having my own car I rear-ended someone because I was paying too much attention to my rearview mirror. Since that day in 2017, I have become a much safer driver. I currently work at Papa John’s as a delivery driver, with my average driving score being 98/100- we are rated on how hard we break, how fast we turn corners, how fast we go, and how fast we accelerate. I am a top driver in my store, I even get a star next to my name. Today, though, I will be bringing up a story that almost left me without my mother and stepfather. My mom and stepfather (we call him Herb, short for Herbert) had moved back to New Jersey at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In May 2021 I got a call from my brother Justin, who lives in California, that our parents were involved in a car accident. They were sitting at a stop light in their 1990s stick shift Toyota Tundra when a flatbed tow truck slammed into them from behind at 50 miles per hour. The driver was texting and hadn’t noticed there was a red light ahead. Luckily, Herb is a physician and my mom is a registered nurse. Herb immediately noticed he was bleeding from his head and tightly tied his shirt around his forehead. He got out to help my mom, who was laying there wondering where she was hurt and why she couldn’t move her right arm. My mother had broken her right scapula, and Herb had a laceration on the back of his scalp from the glass of the back window shooting forward. When I had gotten the first call, I was unaware of the extent of their injuries and planned to book myself a flight from Tucson to Newark then drive the two and a half hours down to Jersey Shore Medical Center. Thankfully, my mom answered her phone when I called immediately. She was awake and aware, she had told me that Herb had been fighting the doctors the whole time to go see her- he wanted to make sure she was alive. My parents met a very long time ago, Herb was once my own father’s doctor and my mom met Herb through that. They ended up working together at Southern Ocean Medical Center in Manahawkin, New Jersey and have been inseparable ever since- so it made sense that Herb was acting this way. My mom was out of work for three months and suffers Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the accident. Since that awful day, I have made sure to drive in my freetime the same way I do while delivering pizzas.

Texting and driving is not the only cause of accidents, though. There are cases where people get into a lane when someone was in their blind spot, not paying attention to what color the light is at an intersection, trying to grab something off the passenger side floor, and many more things. Back in 2018 I got a speeding ticket, and not just any type of speeding ticket- a felony speeding ticket. I was going 60 miles per hour in a 35 mile per hour zone. The officer had seen I was already crying while driving, and did not want to give me the ticket, but he had to because of the severity. As I was told on my court date, in the state of Arizona a minor is entitled to expunging one speeding ticket per year from their record if they go to a driving course. At 16 years old, I took this class gratefully. In this class, the officer teaching explained a few things that I still remember to this day and I think everyone would benefit from knowing. For instance, he taught the class that if you are driving 45 miles per hour and the intersection light turns yellow, you have 4.5 seconds to either stop or get through the intersection. Put a decimal in between the speed limit, this allows you to determine which option is safest. He also told us his friend is a firefighter/EMT, and never once has pulled a dead body out of a seatbelt. This has made the first thing I do getting into my car to put on my seatbelt, before I turn the car on. After taking this course, I found it extremely informative and think that everyone in the state of Arizona should be required to take it. I got my permit through a quick 10 minute test at the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division, and got my training done through a private driving school. Even with ten hours of this driving school, this court-ordered eight hour driving class was far more informative. If everyone were required to take this class, especially those who have been driving for more than a decade, there would be less accidents.

Today, I have my iPhone set to “Do Not Disturb” while I am driving. If I receive a text, it will let the person contacting me I am driving and cannot speak. I am also insured by USAA, and part of my insurance deal is to have an application on my phone where it records how I drive- just like Papa John’s tracks the way I drive with the GPS car topper. Every time I get out of my car it tells me what percentage of my drive I used my phone. It can be annoying because it isn’t always me driving, and most people wouldn’t want their insurance monitoring them so closely, but it makes a huge difference in the way I drive. If more insurance companies did this type of monitoring, there would definitely be far less accidents. It is one thing to make it a law to not text while driving, it is another to not see any officers around and still choose not to use your phone in order to protect yourself and those around you. I am not the only person on the roads, and it is important to recognize I -as well as everyone else with a driver’s license- have the capability of accidentally hurting or killing someone with my car based on my poor attentive skills.